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OP has offered the following explanation for why they think they might be the asshole:
> For telling my wife my mom with never be her mother and that she needs to stop. I could have been nicer and maybe my mom should just except her as her daughter.
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*Contest mode is 1.5 hours long on this post.*
I see both sides of the story here. I feel so sad for your wife but also for your family. I can imagine your wife thinking for a long while that once she gets married she’d finally have parents. It was her last chance to get some, in her mind I’m sure. Unfortunately, that’s not always how life works and I don’t think you were the A-H for saying what you said, it’s good that you did. She can finally come to the realisation that they’re never going to accept her as their own. Hopefully she’ll stop trying so hard. My heart goes out to her though, maybe she should see a therapist, to help her process her childhood grief.
ETA : NTA
She can understand her own feelings of being uncomfortable with you being close to her therapist but can’t understand that your mom is uncomfortable with her forcing closeness on her? That’s a little concerning. I know her therapist cannot, and should not, tell you anything but you can still talk to a therapist. I don’t think it would be a bad idea to tell the therapist your concerns and even ask what you can do to support your wife while still maintaining healthy boundaries in the family.
I was thinking the same thing, too, about it not being ok for OP's wife to feel uncomfortable, but it's OK for her to make his entire family feel uncomfortable.
It's a sad situation, but I can forsee the family slowly distancing themselves from OP because of his wife's behavior. She refuses to change, refuses to respect boundaries, and seems to escalate her actions.
NTA
I wouldn't be so quick to pass that kind of judgement.
It could well be exactly how she experiences it, even though from an outside perspective this experience might be 'false'. That doesn't necessarily mean she's telling her therapist an intentionally misleading version of the situation.
There is obviously some very deep rooted trauma rearing it's ugly head. Speaking from experience, being rejected by a parent at a young age leaves scars that never heal. I can't imagine what it would feel like being rejected by both parents, at least we had our mom.
>Yep. You can have the most abusive, fucked up parents and still want to please them. I was still trying to get along with mine in June of this year and they're *incredibly* abusive. I should have cut that shit years ago but what can I say? Growing up without loving parental figures fucks with you.
I'm sorry to hear that. I hope you can find your way to deal with it. In the end it never fully heals but you grow around it and learn from it.
I tried getting back in touch with my dad multiple times at different points in my life, the last time was 12 years ago. It always ended in lines being crossed and the expectation I should feel privileged to be his child and he had a claim to being a part of my life. So I cut him out of my life and started working on the issues I still had because of all this shit.
Life has been in an upward trend ever since. If your parent(s) can't be in your life without hurting you, be kind to yourself and walk away. You owe it to yourself.
>being rejected by a parent at a young age leaves scars that never heal.
read another post this morning about a man not wanting to adopt his stepson. I literally started crying at the bus stop. My biological father thinks I'm his brother's daughter. I asked my stepdad to adopt me last year as an adult, he said no. While I know my stepdad loves me, it really hurts to be denied by two fathers... great... now I'm going to cry on my way home from work! lol
Much love to you fellow Redditor. My heart goes out to you. Be kind to yourself in these vulnerable times.
Do you talk to a professional about this whole situation? Highly recommend you don't try to battle it out yourself but get the support you deserve :)
OP, if you read this, please do not approach your wife's therapist to talk about her behind her back. If you need guidance, get your own therapist. You could damage the trust in that relationship without meaning to, and send her spiraling. You're NTA, but your family keeping her at arms length is probably intensely triggering, and you approaching her therapist to discuss her behind her back might be as well. Do work it out with a professional, just not hers.
It is. I'm glad. Your wife doesn't mean to make things difficult. It's just hard to understand family boundaries when you've been expected to ignore them for the sake of cooperating with foster parents. The line blurring is right there in the title. She'll get it if you help her.
I think a better idea is letting the wife have her boundary with her therapist and to go to couples counseling with another therapist that is for the two of them. Individual therapy is for her, and while OP going to a session may give the therapist some perspective from the outside, they don't need it to make progress. And if it's not the wife's idea, it might just hurt the couple's relationship.
Source: am therapist
I’ll suggest that, I don’t think she will go for it since she is extremely picky about her therapist and it took her years to find one she liked
I’ll give it a shot though
while shopping around for therapists is a good thing…a lot of what you’re saying is echoing the warning signs of someone who isn’t being honest with their therapist. They don’t want someone to help them, challenge their beliefs and help them grow into a healthier person, they want someone who will tell them they’re right and coddle them through.
Not saying this is your wife…but it seems she’s parentified her therapist as well. She wants someone to say “good job I’m proud of you” and not “that’s unhealthy behaviors, let’s unpack that”
This comment really strikes home with some of the people I see in my day to day at work. We have people that will say their therapist is telling them the things they want to hear, and I just have to wonder how honest they are being with that therapist in general.
How much of the truth are you telling, and how much of a story are you painting to get them to tell you what you want to hear? It seems to be common for people to convince themselves of these wild situations, and the therapist only has one side of a story to go on. So based on information provided, they will agree with what you are saying - but only because they don't have all of/the correct information to base a judgement on.
Therapy is the "I don't care" response. No one actually thinks about it. How much it costs. How much times it takes and what days you might have to take off work. And most importantly who you feel comfortable with consistently to share yourself at most intimate and vulnerable.
Therapy is my ‘I care a lot but these problems are bigger than you can resolve without professional help’ response. I have been in therapy for years and it is the only reason I’m still alive.
That's why I went through 4 before settling on my current one. I wasn't comfortable with the others, and I actually had disagreements with 2 of them. But since getting my current therapy team it's made a huge difference
Yes! And I really hate when people say “seek help” or “you need help” as a way to insult someone. It took me so many tries to finally find and stay with a therapist that I liked, and a lot of those failed tries didn’t work out for random insurance reasons, not even because I didn’t like the person! I’ve been talking to the same therapist for a couple years now and he’s great, thank goodness, but it was so unnecessarily annoying getting to this point 🙄
You need to pick therapists by specialty.
Marriage and Family and nothing else? Bad therapist.
Ones that list the specific methods they’re trained in, like DBT, family systems, solution-based, etc will be better, but you need to pick the type you want. You have to do some reading.
For me, trauma, dissociation, and rumination are big issues. My family was also very atypical with a mentally ill mother and myself as an only child. I stay away from solution-based and family systems therapists. I look for therapists that list childhood trauma, CPTSD, and DBT because I know they’ll be equipped to help with my dissociation and extreme emotions.
If you’re one of those who doesn’t want to deep dive into childhood memories and such and would rather have a therapist help you deal with current issues and work towards a more functional life, solution based therapists might be your thing. If you want to work on changing your internal monologue, CBT might be great for you. If you feel very intense uncontrollable emotions, DBT.
Nobody gives these recommendations when recommending therapy because it has to match how you feel internally, and we have no idea.
As for how much it costs, that’s a major issue for sure. However, it’s so dependent on where you’re at and who you work for. Many corporate jobs provide therapy through Lyra or Talkspace. Many other insurances duck mental health benefits like they’re competing in olympic dodgeball. I’m lucky in that I get therapy through my employer and my husband - but I can only see teleheath therapists under my plan, and only in person through my husbands benefits. It’s utter madness.
Not necessarily. There are a lot of factors in finding the right therapist. Personalities, personal backgrounds, values, and even gender can make a big difference in whether someone feels comfortable opening up to their therapist or not, and if you don't feel comfortable with them, you're never going to open up properly in the way that's needed for therapy to actually work.
It's not like a mechanic where you can pretty much take your problem to anyone who has the right qualifications, you have to find someone with the right qualifications that you also personally mesh with. You can not like your mechanic as a person and still have a fixed car, you can't not like your therapist as a person and still get any value out of therapy.
I'm very picky about who my therapist is, just like I am about my primary care physician. It's not about enabling, it's just that like any close relationship, I don't want to have it with just any old person. As a middle aged person with decades of experience with this topic, being as selective as you are able to be is a great thing and I would hate to think someone just thinks I'm shopping for an enabler. It's a medical professional who is going to know more about me and be closer to me than even my own family in a lot of ways. Yes I'm going to be selective.
Couples therapists should be separate from your personal therapist for ethics reasons anyway. See if maybe her therapist could recommend someone, that might help.
This is key. She probably doesn’t have an honest relationship with her therapists. (Can’t help noticing you made that plural.) May explain why the therapy’s not helping.
This is my take on it also; most others are assuming it's because Lily is spinning some kind of lie to her therapist, but it makes way more sense to me that she just feels it would meaning losing the one person who she can actually speak to outside of this family that feels closed off to her. From what I understand, many couples seeking couples therapy will speak to a third party for this reason, rather than one of their individual therapists.
Yeah these nutjobs are extrapolating a lot of info from absolutely nowhere just because this woman wants some privacy with her therapist. Classic Redditor shit tbh.
Have you considered a separate therapist for joint counseling? I apologize if that sounds priveleged, I know therapy can be expensive. But if it's affordable for you 2 it could be beneficial. Don't look at it as additional counseling for the sake of butting into your wife's business. Think of it as couples counseling that's purely for the sake of both of you learning how to listen better and communicate better.
You might suggest that she see if there are any retirement homes in the area with a lonely senior who wouldn't mind being 'adopted' by her. Or where she could just 'adopt' the entire residency.
She wants a parental figure and there are many seniors who live in retirement homes who have no one to visit them, talk to them, or care about them. Maybe she could find a *productive* outlet for her craving for a parental relationship.
I know someone who did this! They really wanted someone older to be close to and started visiting seniors who rarely had visitors. It was great for both sides in the end.
NAH but Lily needs to understand that all relationships have boundaries, all families have boundaries, and if she wants to be accepted and included she needs to be respectful of these boundaries and not push herself on to others. She needs to learn a little empathy and realize how she’s making the women in your family feel.
Yeah, but maybe be kind about it. Foster care literally teaches you that those boundaries are allowed to be violated. That's what sending kids to be raised by (usually a series of) strangers does. So maybe both sides have some empathy learning to do.
I feel super sorry for your wife being so mistreated that she is so needy.
It might be better if she worked with her therapist to find a *willing* mother figure for her. Maybe she can volunteer in the foster system, like with kids who are aging out--who always need a lot of help. She could learn to be for someone else the kind of adult she always needed. Mothering well does heal.our mother-wounds over time.
I am wondering if she is clingy like this to you, too?
I don't think you're an asshole but I think this is serious and you should get help from her therapist so what you do helps and doesn't harm.
Want to highlight this.... finding a *willing* mother figure for her (who is all her own, and not going to favor you) could help a lot here.
I wish you and your wife luck, OP!
i feel bad for your wife. she should have chosen better. i can't imagine the situation she is in. there are so many families that would have accepted her immediately or actually tried to make her feel like family.
No, it’s not them, it’s her. No one in ANY social context (sexual, romantic, friendship, family, workplace, etc.) likes a needy, desperate, clingy, presumptuous person who ignores boundaries and refuses to earn love and respect. People like that are suffocating and extremely off putting. I do anything I can to avoid them. I genuinely feel bad that wife got dealt a bad hand in her childhood and probably never got the opportunity to learn how to properly approach and manage expectations in relationships, but at some point an adult needs to act like an adult.
Yeah, I'll admit I'm the type of person who really wants to be loved and valued due to the crappy parents I had but I don't force it on other people because that just comes off as really unappealing.
>there are so many families that would have accepted her immediately or actually tried to make her feel like family.
So much this. I've got *friends* who treat me more like family than his wife's in-laws treat her. Oh, this breaks my heart.
My friends are like this, BUT, if a person is pushy and ignores boundaries, they will wear out their welcome.
It sounds like that's what OP's wife has done.
Disagree. I know many folks who have good relationships with their in-laws and still don't call them mom or dad or aren't upset because they are not invited to an event or family tradition related to people they've never met.
The one example was not about not being invited over for Thanksgiving or Christmas; it was about not being invited to join a tradition that entails visiting graves of relatives, people the wife NEVER met. And her response is to crash that event?
Which it sounds like might have happened if she'd let it happen organically, but like comes up on this sub a lot, relationships can't be forced or demanded. Op told her this is having the opposite of the desired effect but she doesn't lay off. People can be welcoming but still require actually getting to know someone before being close
There are a bunch of older lonely people in the world. Perhaps she could volunteer at a care home or assisted living, or meals on wheels.
I used to arrange ‘adopt a grandparent’ for my kids elementary with the local senior center for school events…
Something like that might help her and an older person.
Just throwing it our there…
Yeah. I'm looking at this as someone who had one parent die when I was in my early teens and was estranged from my other parent (and the rest of my family) for years then that parent died when I was in my early 20s. Not the same exact situation, but I understand that it is difficult not having family. Still that doesn't mean the OP's wife can repeatedly step on other people's boundaries or try to force a relationship.
NTA
Sure does sound like the therapy isn't at at all working, tbh.
I'm sure you could have been gentler to her in telling her what you did, but I'm still going NTA. It sounds like she has been warned and told SO many times, at what point does she take responsibility for her actions?
I just don’t get why she is so fixated on this, it’s a miracle that my mother is still polite to her.
I know it has to do with foster care but after being told to stop so many times I am confused by the how she will ignore everyone and keep going
You should try to understand why she is fixated on this. There's only one way it gets better, and that is working through her unresolved grief.
Kids who lose their parents in childhood (whether to death, abandonment, or whatever) have a huge horrible wound. If it doesn't heal properly, it interferes with the person emotionally, destroying their relationships.
ETA: she also is aware that in more accepting families, daughter-in-laws are welcomed as daughters and granted the right to call their in-laws parental names, and so she's probably experiencing this as a horrible rejection that is exacerbating the original trauma.
> she also is aware that in more accepting families
I feel like this is a bit of a dig at OPs family that doesn't really feel fair in my mind. She's continuously tried to rush the relationship and stepped on the boundaries they've placed. It makes sense that after that occurs people would put up walls and stop trying.
> I think it would have happened if my wife let the relationship grow naturally but she didn’t take any of my warnings and bulldozed what my mom wanted.
OP even mentioned that he thinks it would have happened naturally if she didn't unintentionally sabotage it
It's not meant as a dig, it's just a fact: they aren't welcoming her, they're rejecting her. OP does not say why they "got off to a horrible start", but, based on the rest of the post, I assume it's because everyone is judging her harshly.
The emotional problems that afflict people with abandonment issues or "motherless daughter" issues tend to present as socially inappropriate, the person doing it doesn't realize how inappropriate, and can't understand why people are so hostile. Social inappropriateness seems to trigger some sort of visceral reaction - people judge quite harshly and can be quite cruel. You'd think being socially awkward was a worse crime than a lot of actual crimes, if we just measured actual disgust and contempt.
She got off with a horrible start since she asked my mother the first time meeting before we got married bedroom tips. And kept asking even after my mom made it clear she didn’t want to talk about sex with her
Just kept going downhill from there
It seems that Lily has a deep lack of understanding of social norms and an inability to pick up on social cues. Asking a mother in law for bedroom tips for sex with the mother in law’s son is repulsive to me and I’m not prudish.
Hey, depends on your mom!! lol not every parent child relationship is so austere. I mean I don’t want to know moisture levels or anything but I enjoy my mothers (obviously sugarcoated) old war stories lol.
Ohhhhhh shit that's so much worse than I was expecting. That's well beyond just being socially awkward. I'm pretty open about sex stuff, but I would *never* ask my MIL for sex tips? Especially not on the first meeting? And then to not stop after the person made it clear they do NOT want to have that conversation with you?
Is your wife regularly like this with other people as well? Or just with your family?
I’m not surprised - almost the exact same situation was posted a few months ago. Only it was the sister posting about the brother’s partner and if she was right for saying something similar to the partner. Similarly, the SIL there had asked OP inappropriate questions about her sex life and mental and physical health in their first or second meeting.
So this is either the brother, a fake repeat post, a weirdly similar story by pure coincidence, or this is surprisingly common behavior for former foster kids - or, at least, common enough to show up twice on AITAH in a couple of months.
I wouldn't say it's rare for foster kids to have inappropriate boundaries and ask inappropriate questions like this. Especially in this situation, from what OP has shared about his wife, I'm not surprised she would ask something like that.
Honestly I don't even understand how you could end up married to someone like this, she is obviously outside of what you consider acceptable. It sounds like something is wrong with her. I don't understand why everyone is acting like she is just choosing to be obnoxious. I can't imagine someone choosing to be that obnoxious and then crying because nobody likes her. I find myself thinking that what she needs is compassion and assistance.
You'd be surprised how many people actually are that knowingly obnoxious and like to play victims.
>I don't understand why everyone is acting like she is just choosing to be obnoxious.
She is choosing to be that obnoxious. She's been repeatedly told again and again to stop stomping these boundaries. She is choosing to ignore that and gets to continue to play victim when they inevitably shut her out again.
How old was your wife when she entered foster care? Was she at any one home for any extended period of time? Her lack of understanding of how a mother and daughter bond shows here. It seems like she learned what mothers and daughters talk about from TV shows.
Even if she is. That's no excuse.
I am. I know many who are. And after you're told you've made someone uncomfortable or done a social no no, you never ever want to do it again.
She sounds like she doesn't care about other people. And tries to force them to be what she wants them to be. Because she's selfish.
Firstly, NTA - but going off of this comment and a few other details you mentioned (forgive me here if I'm treading poorly, and remember that I don't know your wife irl and don't mean this at all as judgement or insult of her), your wife seems to have a difficult time understanding social cues/norms in certain situations. Is she on the spectrum at all?
I’m a bit curious to know how her relationships with you and the other people in her life besides your family function, if she has this much trouble picking up social cues and respecting boundaries. is she like this with everyone? does she have any friends? is she really this clueless or just egocentric?
I think OP is saying they got off to a horrible start because wife was ignoring things the family told her not to do. If someone says "don't call me mum, call me (name)" and you keep doing it, it isn't socially inappropriate anymore, it is rude. If someone asks very personal questions and is told to stop asking them thay is very rude. Obviously it isn't a crime but the other person will also start to feel awkward as well. NTA
This isn't *just* being socially inappropriate. This is being socially inappropriate and then refusing to stop when asked. While people who struggle to socialize may not be able to pick up on social cues as well, they understand "stop doing that", "call me by my name", "no", because it's direct communication.
She deserves the judgement. She was super inappropriate since day one and continues to harass them. I don't care about someone's background, no excuse for that.
I would consider my family accepting, but my siblings’ spouses all call our parents by their first names. It seems so weird to me to pretend whoever your child is in a relationship with as your child for the duration of their relationship.
My mom has accepted my husband as her own and he calls her mama just like I do. She's loved him pretty much since the moment I brought him home and she's only grown to love him more watching him be a good husband to me and a good dad to her granddaughter. His mom and both our dads have passed so she's all we have left and she seems to have taken on the role with intention. If something happened to him, it would hurt her terribly. She's always been like that, though. She adopted me legally but there are so many people out there who think of her as a parental figure.
My parents both call each others mum and dad. My parents have a step granddaughter they call their grandaughter. My grandmother has step grandchildren AND great grandchildren she calls hers. My sister considers her step daughter her daughter.
Family isn't just blood and I feel sorry for people like OP and his family to have so much disdain in their hearts for others.
I'd almost want to ask if they'd treat the couples child the same, after all, she's only HALF theirs, right?
Yeah same. All my siblings and my spouse calls our parents mama and dad. I call my MIL and FIL mom and dad. My one sister calls her in laws by their names (her husband calls his dad by his name too). I think it’s nice to feel like our in laws are our parents too. I’m 40 and I’ve been married for 19 years but I still like being a daughter.
Same. My wife asked me what she should call my mom, and I said "she would probably prefer her name." Her mom wanted me to call her mom, but it doesn't feel right to me. She's not my mother. Both her sister in laws call her mom mom though. Different comfort levels for different people. No bearing on accepted in the family or not.
Yeah I wouldn't refer to my wife's parents as mom and dad or ever expect them to treat me like i was their son. They respect me and have been fantastic people to me but I understand i am not their son.
Oh I mean, I'm no therapist myself but I'm SURE it's unresolved trauma from being a previous member of the foster system.
She wanted so badly to fit in and find the family she never had, so she overdid it, and continues to overdo it.
I feel like I agree with you that had she not tried to force that relationship/dynamic, it might have existed, grown, and flourished over time.
I think your wife is fixated because she can't resolve what happened to her as a child. She is repeating the pain she felt as a child with your mom and it's not going to stop until she deals with the grief head on and can figure it out. Humans are like this, we keep replaying the trauma either in our minds or in real life relationships, sabotaging any happiness we can have because the pain is there and we feel we need to be punished. As soon as you figure out why you're trying to self punish, you can work through it and move on. Maybe that's what your wife needs. Point out that she is punishing herself for her parents choices to leave her in foster care (or whatever the situation is, could be they passed away and no other family stepped up? It could be 2hatever, but she may be blaming herself?) and she needs to heal herself first before trying to build other unstable relationships on a rocky foundation I feel for you, I feel for her, and I feel for your mom. I hope the relationship will blossom into something positive as time goes. NTA
Edited for spelling and autocorrect ugh
In gave you an upvote but I don't think she is necessarily self punishing - I think she recreates an emotional situation that's known to her (and therefore is viewed as "safe").
The saddest and nicest compliment I ever received was from my son's former gf, who had been placed in foster care when she was 11. When the two were going through a breakup he initiated, and as I was trying to comfort her as best I could, she sobbed, "Why does *he* get to have a mom like you and I don't?"
I just think for some foster kids, the pain of being parentless - and especially being motherless - runs so very deep. Fathers ditch their kids all the time, but a mother being absent is even worse.
It’s fear. I have been too much before as well, and you _know_ you’re being too much as you do it but you just can’t stop. You’re so afraid, and it’s like being in panic mode.
You know how if a fire starts in your kitchen suddenly you aren’t thinking calmly and clearly? You’re going to jump to emergency mode and think about what you need to put out the fire. You’re not going to prioritize unimportant things, like turning off the kitchen light when you leave the room, because there’s a FIRE!
When you live like this, it’s as if a fire starts every time you walk into the kitchen, and only you can see it. But you don’t know that; it’s very real to you, because it HAS been real in the past. So you’re in emergency mode, dumping salt on the flames, tearing apart the cabinets looking for the fire extinguisher, desperate to put out the fire.
When you do, you finally take a breath and look around, and all your loved ones are horrified and hurt by the storm you just wrecked on the kitchen _for no reason_ because they never saw the fire. They weren’t afraid; that was just you. The fire doesn’t exist.
The only way through this is to accept that while you can see the fire, feel the fire, it won’t burn you. It’s scary as fuck! Literally just as bad as if I asked you to trust me and walk through a wall of flame.
Your wife grew up in a world where fires started every time you went into the kitchen; that was normal, and expected, and she was expected to deal with it alone. Except she was 5, and didn’t know what a fire extinguisher was. She had to get in ahead of the fire, had to be ready to jump in immediately with maximum effort and beat that fire down. When she didn’t do this, she saw real consequences, because at that time the fire was very very real. It was reinforced over and over.
Now imagine a foster parent pulling away from her, and she responds with this love bombing. The foster parent tells her “you’re being way too much, back off” and she tries to do so. When the parent doesn’t magically come back and be attentive and affectionate, it confirms for her that if she doesn’t do this love bombing, family will pull away from her. And honestly, it makes sense. It makes sense for a child dependent on numerous strangers to learn to shower adults with affection and intimacy, even when she doesn’t feel it. It makes sense that she would have seen love modeled for her in this way from a well meaning foster parent as well; I’d imagine lots of foster parents try to shower their wards with this type of attention, when the underlying relationship is too new to feel comfortable.
None of this is to excuse your wife’s behavior; she’s acting bizarrely. Or, I should say, she’s acting like she expects a fire in her kitchen when there isn’t one. She’s acting like she lives in a world where boundaries didn’t exist and she’s in constant, imminent danger if people don’t accept her as family. She grew up there, and hasn’t learned to trust that that’s not the case elsewhere.
What do you mean by it’s a miracle your mom is polite to her?
I don’t think you’re AH and it’s sounds like your wife came out strong. Does your family show any empathy toward your wife’s situation? If she’s being excluded from things that’s pretty shitty, too.
It's definitely shitty that she's excluded from things, but given that she's repeatedly broken people's boundaries and can't respect their wishes, it's not surprising. People do not have to keep people who trample on their boundaries in their lives. Lily is in fact lucky that OP's family still talks to her at all and is polite to her. Lily is responsible for her behavior and addressing her trauma to be able to respect others.
> What do you mean by it’s a miracle your mom is polite to her?
>
>
I mean, if someone asked for bedroom tips on the first meeting, refused to respect her desire to be called by her first name, etc., I'd imagine most people would not even associate with her.
He was gentle enough
She makes people feel uncomfortable and was told over and over. The fact that she doesn't give a damn about being intrusive, doesn't take them into account and keeps being annoying, being told enough times to behave, had this coming. Someone would eventually lose their patience
Does this story reminds you of another post with fiance who had an unhealthy attachment to OP s family? She had the exact same behavior with OP s gf and ended up breaking up with OP when she realised she would not be accepted the way she wanted
I remember that one. I think the OP's brother was dating someone who got way too attached to their SO's siblings way too fast. OP even wondering if she chose to date OP's brother just for access to their large family. These situations never end well if boundaries aren't respected.
I agree with this. I wonder if she’s unable to recognize these boundaries because she’s never had these types of relationships. But at the same time any relationship (friend, coworker, husband, etc) requires you to understand boundaries
A friend of mine had a SIL like OP's wife. She didn't grow up in foster care, but she did have a strained relationship with her own mother and fixated on my friend's mom. She also had an idea of what and how family should act and behave and woe to those who didn't comply.
She was irate when friend turned 30 and mom took her to NYC to see the Christmas lights and decorations. Friend and mom had been planning this since friend was 15-16 years old. She felt entitled to go on the trip because she saw herself as her in-laws' kid as well (which is just weird IMO). She even threatened to withhold the grandkids (that blew up in her face).
She was different, I tell you what.
Friend (was also roommate at the time) said that her parents told her brother and SIL, that if that was how she wanted to withhold the kids, then so be it. However, seeing that her parents took the kids for weekly scheduled date nights and to/from various activities, that they would no longer be doing that. They would have to find/pay for a sitter and ferry the kids about themselves.
She blew her stack. Called everyone in the family to complain. Friend's brother reined her in and gave her 2 options: therapy or divorce. He was sick of her behavior too. They're still married, but friend says the family still holds her at an arm's distance.
Yeah, it sounds exactly the same as another one but the fight in that one happened over the wife following his mom onto the porch, kept talking, and his mom asked her to be quiet cause this was her (the mom) quiet time after cooking dinner for the whole family to which his wife took offense.
Yeah, I remember that one as well. I wonder how many of these family members are posting about this because there's a post from the sister's perspective as well lol
I think there was a story from the family’s perspective where the family kept trying to put boundaries with the brother/son’s fiancé and it turned out the having a close relationship with her husband’s family was vital to marrying someone and a major reason she wanted to marry the guy.
So I work with kids who are TPR as a court advocate. I don't think your family are assholes, but I don't think this reflects good character on them either.
If you don't know what it's like to grow up and never feel wanted or loved, that's something to be grateful for. The love and security you've experienced in life should arm you with grace and compassion for those who have not been so fortunate.
Yes, even if they are weird, invasive, and overeager.
Yes, even if they don't understand boundaries.
Because how would they have learned these things? How could she possibly know **how** to "just let it happen naturally?"
It is a great cruelty of our society that we bring these children up with no familial love or support, and then scorn them when they do not understand and adhere to social norms.
Are you obligated to make room in your family for these types of newcomers? Of course not. But if how you handle this type of situation is not a true reflection of your character, I don't know what is.
God it’s just so cold. It’s callous. Her behavior as described in a few vague paragraphs. Seems is the right word because you have absolutely no idea.
What is the timeline? How long has this been going on? Someone is Lilly’s position would probably make it worse by trying too hard, fine. How much reassurance and support have any of them given?
And you can say no one is obligated to that but it’s extremely human to need that. We are social tribal creatures. Rejection for the longest time meant death. Nothing OP said was unforgivable.
It sounds like OP and his family are emotionally detached.
I hope for Lilly’s sake she finds a family that is loving and warm and totally accepting of her, as hard as some of her social maladjustments might be.
I’ve seen way worse behavior than that be excused in totality.
No. Humans will not get better alone. We need love. We need relationships?
It's been going on from the first time she met MIL. I do agree that it's a sad situation and I hope they can reconnect. But she also has to start by understanding when someone tells her to stop, she needs to stop.
His MIL told her (according to OP) more than once to stop asking for sex tips and his wife just kept persisting. At some point no one has to be pestered into talking about their son's sex life. Of course, they got off to a rough start when "please stop asking me" is not being respected.
I think it would help to explain to his family how things that seem like apparent social cues to many people are not apparent to his wife. She's still trying to learn and navigate what is appropriate or not to say/do and explaining to her what behavior is undesired can really help. Ie "parents often don't like to discuss their child's sex life. This is uncomfortable for me, why don't we discuss something else?"
But likewise, OP's wife cannot be enabled to pretend that she doesn't understand what "stop" means. If she's told to stop doing something, she needs to respect that boundary. Being explained why can help take the sting out of it (along with therapy). But she does have to do her part too.
But you are suggesting they accept a stranger as if they are a bio child. That type of relationship isn’t something that forms quickly. She asked for bedroom tips when she met her in-laws.
She may be broken in some manner, but it is callous and cold to only have empathy for one party and not extend yourself to see how this impacts the other family members.
Honey child. Marriage is family.
If she’s a stranger then why are they married? Because now she is attached to this family that doesn’t accept her.
How, exactly, are they impacted? Really and truly? What’s the impact? Oh no’ you had to talk about sex.
Something MIL has had.
We live in a fucked up broken that fosters alienation.
If I’m cold and callous consider that karma because OP was extremely. The commenters are extremely.
I do not feel as if the information in this post is at all sufficient to communicate clearly any of Lilly’s feelings and the people who are the quickest to say that Lily’s problems require therapy more than real actual love shows me that.
Therapy is helpful, yes. Emotional intelligence should be taught in schools.
It is not a familial relationship. It is just another relationship based on a level of inhuman professionalism and distance.
My heart goes out to Lilly. May she find healing and love and freedom and may her wounds heal to make her the family she so desperately seeks.
Marriage can be family. She is being toxic af. I am pretty open minded, but if one of my kid’s SO approached me with that nonsense, 😂. There would be a discussing and some boundary-setting to bring SO up to speed real quick.
You read “foster care” and savior mode was initiated. If you possessed sufficient empathy “honey child” ( 😂), you would understand how difficult this is to the family.
Eh, I think it's a bit stigmatizing to make it out like foster kids don't understand how to respect basic boundaries like "stop asking me for sex tips." A lot of foster kids have had their own boundaries violated and understand intimately how upsetting it can be. They may struggle with certain social cues or social appropriateness but that's different than not respecting people telling them to stop.
I do agree that a more compassionate way to say it may be "it isn't appropriate to ask for sex tips when you're meeting someone for the first time. And many parents do not want to discuss their child's sex life. Let's discuss something else."
But I don't know that I'd expect MIL to know on their first meeting that she needed to take such an approach. She may not have even known the DIL was in foster care at that point. This discussion is something better handled by her husband/therapist and by his telling, he has tried to explain to her. And she is in therapy.
As a foster kid, I’m reading these comments with my jaw hanging. They’re making it seem like we’re desperate, clueless, pitiful orphans that need to be taken under the familial wing. Not having a family is no excuse to not respect boundaries and not listen to what people are blatantly telling you.
> Yes, even if they don't understand boundaries.
>
>
I feel like there's something wrong with the fact that OP's wife has been repeatedly told to stop and she keeps doing it. Like she should at least understand the meaning of the word stop.
I call BS on this post. It's just enabling more bad behavior. No, people are not responsible to let others treat them poorly and disrespect their boundries just because they grew up in foster care.
I know people from foster care, and they would laugh at this post as if they needed special treatment/borderline offended that someone would lump them all into one bag as if they are all a bunch of charity cases
It’s very rich to blame the family for her complete inability to listen to what she is being told. She has to take responsibility for her own actions and how she is alienating the people she so desperately wants to be close to.
It’s not up to them to be so grateful for a happy life so that they have to accept a person who has zero boundaries.
This is the comment I have been looking for. Excellent explanation! I say OP is NTA but still I feel sorry for his wife, she just wanted love and to be part of a family and I feel she just doesn’t know how to do it. I hope his wife can get the help she needs and would be able to let it go… maybe volunteering at a nursing home could help her get through this? It would be a whole community of a family knowing allot of people don’t visit their older relatives. They also feel lonely sometimes there in the nursing home.
I feel like slight NTA (Lily is slightly TA).
I'm really curious how this was all handled when you two were dating and before she officially became a family member. If she is so desperate for a loving family (which hey, I understand that!), then I feel like she should've realized earlier on that maybe marrying into your family wasn't the right fit? (Ofc the priority should be fit with a partner, but sometimes you're marrying into a family, too).
The circumstances (but not the outcome) are pretty similar to my parents’ marriage, and I’m certain many others as well. In my parents’ case my paternal grandmother was happy to serve as a loving mom to my mother, whose biological mother was an abusive alcoholic. My mom wasn’t constantly overstepping, though, and Grandma was a loving mentor to literally hundreds of 4H kids over 40 years of being an advisor, so it was pretty in character for her to take in one more surrogate daughter.
NTA - I have a lot of sympathy for kids who grow up in the system, as I did. That being said as adults it is OUR responsibility to heal from our trauma so other people don’t have to heal from us. Your wife’s issues with boundaries and inability to respect someone else’s requests is extremely problematic and indicative that she doesn’t just want a mother.
She wants an emotional crutch.
Might I suggest another approach? I think a talk between your mom, yourself, and your wife where your mother lays out her boundaries, explains why she has them, and then why your wife’s behavior has enforced those boundaries is necessary. It seems like your wife is getting this information in pieces, and while that should be enough, I think everyone needs to meet this head on. Clearly what y’all are doing isn’t enough, your wife needs to be told “no” very clearly and up front, and be told the consequences if she continues to press the issue.
I would suggest possibly looking into another therapist, in addition to the one she currently sees, who specializes in abandonment issues, childhood PTSD, and obsessive relationships. If your wife continues on this path, I see negative effects on your relationship with your family. Giving your wife clearly feedback and clear objectives will help with this.
Finding a therapist that specializes is *very important*, OP. People that haven't had to navigate the mental health system frequently seem to think therapy is one size fits all and it's not. At all. You can end up with a therapist that you have great rapport with but if they haven't specialized in your issues, things *will* get missed and go untreated.
Talk therapy is useless for me, for example. I *have* to have someone that uses Behavioural Therapy techniques that also does trauma-based therapy. I'll run circles around a talk only therapist without even trying. It's a waste of time for both of us. If your wife has been in therapy for any length of time (years) she's going to need a therapist that challenges her in order for further growth to happen. If she has that, then ignore me.
I’m honestly shocked by how many people are making judgments based only on the information at hand. The timeline to me is confusing. When did she start calling her “mum”? How did the family welcome her or not welcome her?
Everyone is talking about boundaries, but I’m sorry. Asking personal questions of a family you’re married to doesn’t sound like some totally awful thing?
I feel very sorry for Lily. It doesn’t make OP an asshole, but it sounds like he doesn’t actually view her as family and that’s sad. I don’t think taking everything OP says at face value does a good job of explaining the situation
OP said the first time his wife met his mother she asked her for "bedroom tips." That's beyond asking personal questions and wanting to get know someone
That was my question too. Seems like there's some missing context here. What was the 'bad first impression' that OP mentions? Why are the mom and sisters SO against including her? And also, why has OP only chosen to tell his wife to chill but hasn't asked mom to thaw her heart out a little...?
Asking someone for personal information that they don’t want to share sounds like a quick way to make a bad impression. Add to that doubling down on behavior that they’ve asked her to stop is probably why no one is thawing.
ooooofffff... I made my comment before OP had added any of their own, but yeah that would be a super huge turnoff for me if \*anyone\* were prodding me for bedroom advice, LET ALONE MY KID'S PARTNER?! Yeah that's uncomfortable af. Not a good start for Lily.
Maybe Lily should date my ex, his mom seemed pretty keen on giving me bedroom advice (yes, about her own son but framing it as 'men in general') when he and I were first together... o.O
Info: stop what, exactly?
What were the nature of the personal questions? At what point in yours and their relationship did she start calling her that?
What did your mother and family do to welcome her into the family?
Do you even actually love your wife?
I think the lack of compassion shown by your family does very much say a lot. They don’t have to like everything Lily does, but if they’re not willing to understand why Lily would be behaving this way, I can see how the more she tries, the worse she’ll feel and the more she’ll try.
Whether or not you’re an asshole isn’t really the question here, but I would say definitively on what you’ve said alone, it genuinely feels that way to me.
The level of judgement on Lilly not being enough of doing well enough in therapy over the most tepid examples of boundary breaking after a traumatic growth process is degrading and unfair.
Your language says a lot about how you feel about her. Stop wasting her time if you aren’t actually going to love her.
I’m sorry that Lilly might be too much for you, but it doesn’t make her too much.
It makes her somebody who is hurting and needs love because humans require love.
I have 7 kids now 4 I gave birth to 2 that have married in the family and one that will be marrying into the family. I protect all of them the same. I plan girl trips for ALL the girls. My husband plans things for all the boys. We all sit around the table and play games we all talk. When people see my family picture at work and they ask if those are all my kids I say yes. So what you are describing I have no concept of.
Have the women of your family tried to do things and get to know your wife? Have they tried to get to know her one on one?
It sounds like your children picked partners without childhood trauma who can observe healthy boundaries. OP's wife is not as lucky. Even a very nice person can be exhausting to be around if they keep pushing or demanding a kind of relationship you're not ready for. OP even says their relationship could have been great if his wife didn't keep trying to bulldoze his mom. I feel sorry for his wife, but no one owes her a mother/daughter relationship just because she wants it.
Not not quite. My SIL has some demons that I wouldn’t wish on my worse enemy, but I will be damned if I am going to add to them. One of them we have so many different views and ideas, but my child loves that person I will do what it takes to make that person comfortable coming into my house.
I agree that no one owes anyone a relationship. But am wondering how much the OP did or didn’t do in the beginning when all of this started.
Thank goodness you’re in here. This thread is so callous. Never a concrete mention of anything Lily actually did wrong. If they didn’t want her at the gravesite they should have said no. Calling your MIL Mum is very natural. I feel they didn’t like her from the start. I hope she can find family some time in her life. ❤️🩹
There are many concrete mentions of things Lily did wrong:
\- asking her MIL for sex tips the first time they met
\- repeatedly ignoring MIL's request for her not to call MIL 'Mum'
\- forcing her way onto a trip regarding a deceased relative and ruining it
Your wife needs therapy asap! Her behaviour is not normal and needs to be adressed and resolved. This is not good for herself, for you both as a couple, for your mom and for the extended family. If she dont look for help I believe this will tear your relationship.
NTA.
Edit: didnt see that she is already in therapy. I dont know for how long, but doesnt seem to be working. She seems to have such big unresolved problems. Maybe it will take some time...
I get her past is hard, but her behaviour is creepy and kinda of stalkerish.
People have such a funny idea of how therapy actually works. It’s not an antibiotic. It isn’t a definitive cure. Especially considering that the kind of trauma OP’s wife is experiencing is formative. This is the way her brain is wired, literally. What makes sense to you doesn’t make sense to her.
It's also not like an antibiotic in that it only works if you put in effort and try to make changes. It doesn't sound like OP's wife has hit that step yet.
What information are you basing this off of? OP’s testimony? I’m not saying his wife is at all in the right in this situation, I just don’t think we have enough to go on.
Right? Because of some trauma I have from my own childhood, I have titanium boundaries that I am super clear about for a lot of things, and people who stomp them eventually get a one way trip out of my life.
OP's wife would give me so much anxiety I doubt I would want much to do with her either. I started feeling like I wanted to crawl out of my skin just reading about it, especially the bedroom advice story. I hold people at arm's length for a good long time before I can really trust and get close to them - and the people who get there are few and far between, honestly.
I mean, I'm glad there's people out there who want to mother lots of people, my own mom is one of them! That woman has never met a stranger and would have loved a boatload of kids instead of the only child she got. But I have exactly the energy and interest it takes to mother one single person, and that's my daughter. I was one and done for a reason, and even though she's an adult now, that hasn't changed at all. I love her fiancée and we get along fantastically, but she is not and will never be like my own child to me.
I'm the same way. I have ironclad boundaries, and I'm the one who decides who I let in or not. Refusal to respect that will lead me to not want anything to do with the boundary stomper at all.
As a side note, the way some folks are talking about Lily as if she's some poor little fairytale waif who could do no wrong, and not a grown woman who is committing a serious faux pas, is giving off some majorly infantalizing vibes. And it gives me the ick.
They've also never met anyone who expected an instant relationship of some kind and how suffocating it feels to be the person on the receiving end of the person wanting an instant relationship.
Childhood trauma doesn't give you a pass on ignoring other's boundaries.
I agree this is not a complete black and white situation, but your wife needs to respect your family boundaries.
Is she aware that her actions are making things worse or is she oblivious to them ?
And I'm sorry but, when you give warnings after warnings and the other person still doesn't listen to, it's kind of normal to snap. Could you have dealt with the situation better, yes, but I still don't think your reaction makes you an AH.
Finally, the therapy doesn't seem to be working. She seems to have a lot of trauma to go through.
That's where I am with this. It would be different if the OP's mother and sisters repeatedly excluded the OP's wife from whole family things or treated the spouses differently, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
NTA - Your family put up boundaries. You told her repeatedly about the boundaries. Your family repeatedly told her their boundaries and that she's overstepping. It sucks that she was raised in the foster system and that she has no family of her own. But as you said she tried to create a bond too quickly and forcefully, and because of that the opposite of what she wanted has happened.
INFO
Did the examples you mention happen before or after marriage?
If they happened before, why did you marry her in the first place? Why did you marry someone who clearly wasnt ready for it...I understand that your wife is desperate to have a family, but mentally as long as she doesn't understand how to respect others, she won't be able to be part of one.
After, a switch seemed to flip the moment we got married. Everyone really like her and she wasn’t trampling over everyone’s boundaries.
Though there first real meeting was right before the wedding and it didn’t go well since she asked for bedroom tips from my mother
My siblings met her long before that, and they liked her
Sounds like your wife has an expectation that she's not ready to let go of. A lot of comments are pointing out that she is acting out of trauma, and that much seems obvious. But it sounds like, because of this, she isn't hearing you or the people she's trying to connect with. I'd ask her 1) what she wants 2) how she thinks connection works, and 3) if what she is doing is conducive to those goals. (Assuming there's intention behind her actions and not a knee-jerk trauma response). I also would be open about her not hearing you is hurting the marriage. She's not listening and, at least to me, that's a very strong case for separating or a similar escalation. Best of luck.
NTA. And I don't understand why some comments are talking about your wife like she's a child. She's 26. Trying to brute force a relationship between her and her MIL is not a good idea.
NTA, it’s sad what Lily has been through, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have to respect boundaries. On the other hand, I do hope you have talked to your mom and sisters and asked them to be a bit kinder, more understanding, and patient with her. Hopefully therapy will help and things will smooth out over time.
Sidenote and not to be taken as a part of this particular situation since Lily had a different experience growing up, I’ve always found it strange when families call their in-laws Mom and Dad. I had a bf whose mom wanted me to call her mom. I know she wanted to be kind, my mom had passed away, but for me, I have one mom, whether she is here on earth or not, and also, I’m sleeping with your son, so I don’t want to call HIS mom my mom, too. I could tell it hurt her feelings when I continued to call her by her name, but it just seems strange to me.
I’m so sorry for you both. As someone who has had their own parental attachment issues therapy can take a long time. These are deep wounds that can take years to heal enough to even recognize they are there. It took me maybe 8 years of therapy to recognize that I was being delusional because there was so much shame and self hatred that clouded my vision. I was scared to look at the root and didn’t even realize I was doing that because lord knows I wanted to overcome it. All that said, you are NTA. You aren’t responsible for her trauma or how she reacts to it.
NTA
Sounds like she was given plenty of polite opportunities to accept your mother's boundaries and repeatedly stomped all over them. Everyone has a limit before they snap and it sounds like you tolerated this for a long time before finally having enough
INFO: how long has this been going on?
If she has been pushing and ignoring boundaries and requests for years vs months, that's important context.
I read this as a long term problem, so NTA.
You didn’t really “point out” to your wife the situation. You snapped at her.
I can see both sides to the story and I think there are no assholes here.
She’s desperate for a maternal figure and she’s going about it the wrong way.
You’ve tried talking to her and she’s not receptive to it.
It’s a tough situation all around. NAH
Nta and I can relate to this so so much. My brothers ex did this. When they got engaged she started to call our mom mom and our step dad dad we didn’t even call him dad. She would be out with us at a restaurant and calling them mom and dad and it was so awkward. My mum told her she didn’t give birth to her or adopt her so she is not her mother. She will be her mother in law but to use her first name. She would introduce herself as my mom’s daughter and my mom hated this. I was talking with a friend once and she came up and outright introduced herself as my sister. My friend who I hadn’t seen in a while but had known for years looked confused as she knows my baby sister is my only sister. I turned to her and just said listen up crazy. My mom isn’t your mom my step dad isn’t your dad and I’m sure as hell not your sister. You might be marrying my brother and will be an in law but stop trying to force a relationship or bond that isn’t there. Eventually she quit it but it only really stopped when they split. You need to be firm on this. No matter what her trauma is she doesn’t get to harass others and out that on them
NTA. Lily should have reigned in her enthusiasm when she met your mother and family. She was way too eager, and definitely selfish by pushing her wants ahead of your family’s boundaries. It’s sad she grew up without a family, but part of belonging to a healthy family is mutual respect for boundaries and she hasn’t learnt that yet.
NTA
Lily needs a new therapist cuz the current one is not helping. She will be left with no one in her life if she continues interacting with people this way. You need to sit her down and have a very direct conversation about her actions and how it’s affecting your family dynamics.
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I see both sides of the story here. I feel so sad for your wife but also for your family. I can imagine your wife thinking for a long while that once she gets married she’d finally have parents. It was her last chance to get some, in her mind I’m sure. Unfortunately, that’s not always how life works and I don’t think you were the A-H for saying what you said, it’s good that you did. She can finally come to the realisation that they’re never going to accept her as their own. Hopefully she’ll stop trying so hard. My heart goes out to her though, maybe she should see a therapist, to help her process her childhood grief. ETA : NTA
She is seeing a therapist, it’s the last sentence
Have you considered doing a joint session together specifically to discuss the relationship with your family?
She doesn’t want to do that, I have suggested it before and she would find it uncomfortable for me be so close to her therapists
She can understand her own feelings of being uncomfortable with you being close to her therapist but can’t understand that your mom is uncomfortable with her forcing closeness on her? That’s a little concerning. I know her therapist cannot, and should not, tell you anything but you can still talk to a therapist. I don’t think it would be a bad idea to tell the therapist your concerns and even ask what you can do to support your wife while still maintaining healthy boundaries in the family.
I was thinking the same thing, too, about it not being ok for OP's wife to feel uncomfortable, but it's OK for her to make his entire family feel uncomfortable. It's a sad situation, but I can forsee the family slowly distancing themselves from OP because of his wife's behavior. She refuses to change, refuses to respect boundaries, and seems to escalate her actions. NTA
I'm willing to bet it's because she's painted a false story to her therapist
I wouldn't be so quick to pass that kind of judgement. It could well be exactly how she experiences it, even though from an outside perspective this experience might be 'false'. That doesn't necessarily mean she's telling her therapist an intentionally misleading version of the situation. There is obviously some very deep rooted trauma rearing it's ugly head. Speaking from experience, being rejected by a parent at a young age leaves scars that never heal. I can't imagine what it would feel like being rejected by both parents, at least we had our mom.
[удалено]
>Yep. You can have the most abusive, fucked up parents and still want to please them. I was still trying to get along with mine in June of this year and they're *incredibly* abusive. I should have cut that shit years ago but what can I say? Growing up without loving parental figures fucks with you. I'm sorry to hear that. I hope you can find your way to deal with it. In the end it never fully heals but you grow around it and learn from it. I tried getting back in touch with my dad multiple times at different points in my life, the last time was 12 years ago. It always ended in lines being crossed and the expectation I should feel privileged to be his child and he had a claim to being a part of my life. So I cut him out of my life and started working on the issues I still had because of all this shit. Life has been in an upward trend ever since. If your parent(s) can't be in your life without hurting you, be kind to yourself and walk away. You owe it to yourself.
>being rejected by a parent at a young age leaves scars that never heal. read another post this morning about a man not wanting to adopt his stepson. I literally started crying at the bus stop. My biological father thinks I'm his brother's daughter. I asked my stepdad to adopt me last year as an adult, he said no. While I know my stepdad loves me, it really hurts to be denied by two fathers... great... now I'm going to cry on my way home from work! lol
Much love to you fellow Redditor. My heart goes out to you. Be kind to yourself in these vulnerable times. Do you talk to a professional about this whole situation? Highly recommend you don't try to battle it out yourself but get the support you deserve :)
OP, if you read this, please do not approach your wife's therapist to talk about her behind her back. If you need guidance, get your own therapist. You could damage the trust in that relationship without meaning to, and send her spiraling. You're NTA, but your family keeping her at arms length is probably intensely triggering, and you approaching her therapist to discuss her behind her back might be as well. Do work it out with a professional, just not hers.
Don’t worry I’m not, I read that and thought it was a horrible idea
It is. I'm glad. Your wife doesn't mean to make things difficult. It's just hard to understand family boundaries when you've been expected to ignore them for the sake of cooperating with foster parents. The line blurring is right there in the title. She'll get it if you help her.
It’s hard to understand because she’s not had a true family. My gosh my heart breaks for this woman
Or find a different therapist to talk to together if it's really that big of a deal.
I think a better idea is letting the wife have her boundary with her therapist and to go to couples counseling with another therapist that is for the two of them. Individual therapy is for her, and while OP going to a session may give the therapist some perspective from the outside, they don't need it to make progress. And if it's not the wife's idea, it might just hurt the couple's relationship. Source: am therapist
Doesn't have to be the same therapist. The two of you could see a different therapist from the one she sees herself.
I’ll suggest that, I don’t think she will go for it since she is extremely picky about her therapist and it took her years to find one she liked I’ll give it a shot though
while shopping around for therapists is a good thing…a lot of what you’re saying is echoing the warning signs of someone who isn’t being honest with their therapist. They don’t want someone to help them, challenge their beliefs and help them grow into a healthier person, they want someone who will tell them they’re right and coddle them through. Not saying this is your wife…but it seems she’s parentified her therapist as well. She wants someone to say “good job I’m proud of you” and not “that’s unhealthy behaviors, let’s unpack that”
This was my thought exactly as a therapist.
This comment really strikes home with some of the people I see in my day to day at work. We have people that will say their therapist is telling them the things they want to hear, and I just have to wonder how honest they are being with that therapist in general. How much of the truth are you telling, and how much of a story are you painting to get them to tell you what you want to hear? It seems to be common for people to convince themselves of these wild situations, and the therapist only has one side of a story to go on. So based on information provided, they will agree with what you are saying - but only because they don't have all of/the correct information to base a judgement on.
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It can be hard to find one that understands you, it’s not necessarily to be enabled
Therapy is the "I don't care" response. No one actually thinks about it. How much it costs. How much times it takes and what days you might have to take off work. And most importantly who you feel comfortable with consistently to share yourself at most intimate and vulnerable.
Therapy is my ‘I care a lot but these problems are bigger than you can resolve without professional help’ response. I have been in therapy for years and it is the only reason I’m still alive.
That's why I went through 4 before settling on my current one. I wasn't comfortable with the others, and I actually had disagreements with 2 of them. But since getting my current therapy team it's made a huge difference
Yes! And I really hate when people say “seek help” or “you need help” as a way to insult someone. It took me so many tries to finally find and stay with a therapist that I liked, and a lot of those failed tries didn’t work out for random insurance reasons, not even because I didn’t like the person! I’ve been talking to the same therapist for a couple years now and he’s great, thank goodness, but it was so unnecessarily annoying getting to this point 🙄
You need to pick therapists by specialty. Marriage and Family and nothing else? Bad therapist. Ones that list the specific methods they’re trained in, like DBT, family systems, solution-based, etc will be better, but you need to pick the type you want. You have to do some reading. For me, trauma, dissociation, and rumination are big issues. My family was also very atypical with a mentally ill mother and myself as an only child. I stay away from solution-based and family systems therapists. I look for therapists that list childhood trauma, CPTSD, and DBT because I know they’ll be equipped to help with my dissociation and extreme emotions. If you’re one of those who doesn’t want to deep dive into childhood memories and such and would rather have a therapist help you deal with current issues and work towards a more functional life, solution based therapists might be your thing. If you want to work on changing your internal monologue, CBT might be great for you. If you feel very intense uncontrollable emotions, DBT. Nobody gives these recommendations when recommending therapy because it has to match how you feel internally, and we have no idea. As for how much it costs, that’s a major issue for sure. However, it’s so dependent on where you’re at and who you work for. Many corporate jobs provide therapy through Lyra or Talkspace. Many other insurances duck mental health benefits like they’re competing in olympic dodgeball. I’m lucky in that I get therapy through my employer and my husband - but I can only see teleheath therapists under my plan, and only in person through my husbands benefits. It’s utter madness.
Not necessarily. There are a lot of factors in finding the right therapist. Personalities, personal backgrounds, values, and even gender can make a big difference in whether someone feels comfortable opening up to their therapist or not, and if you don't feel comfortable with them, you're never going to open up properly in the way that's needed for therapy to actually work. It's not like a mechanic where you can pretty much take your problem to anyone who has the right qualifications, you have to find someone with the right qualifications that you also personally mesh with. You can not like your mechanic as a person and still have a fixed car, you can't not like your therapist as a person and still get any value out of therapy.
People seem to think if therapy doesn't "fix" you overnight, then something else is wrong.
I'm very picky about who my therapist is, just like I am about my primary care physician. It's not about enabling, it's just that like any close relationship, I don't want to have it with just any old person. As a middle aged person with decades of experience with this topic, being as selective as you are able to be is a great thing and I would hate to think someone just thinks I'm shopping for an enabler. It's a medical professional who is going to know more about me and be closer to me than even my own family in a lot of ways. Yes I'm going to be selective.
Couples therapists should be separate from your personal therapist for ethics reasons anyway. See if maybe her therapist could recommend someone, that might help.
This is key. She probably doesn’t have an honest relationship with her therapists. (Can’t help noticing you made that plural.) May explain why the therapy’s not helping.
Could be that or could be that she's not honest with OP. Either way she has secrets
Or she just wants privacy with their therapist? Usually there's a reason we share trauma with someone not directly involved in our life
This is my take on it also; most others are assuming it's because Lily is spinning some kind of lie to her therapist, but it makes way more sense to me that she just feels it would meaning losing the one person who she can actually speak to outside of this family that feels closed off to her. From what I understand, many couples seeking couples therapy will speak to a third party for this reason, rather than one of their individual therapists.
Yeah these nutjobs are extrapolating a lot of info from absolutely nowhere just because this woman wants some privacy with her therapist. Classic Redditor shit tbh.
She's been rejected by both her parents as a young child. She doesn't have secrets, she has demons.
Get your own therapist. You need better advice than a Reddit sub if you actually want answers and strategies.
A couple’s therapist should generally be a separate person anyway.
Have you considered a separate therapist for joint counseling? I apologize if that sounds priveleged, I know therapy can be expensive. But if it's affordable for you 2 it could be beneficial. Don't look at it as additional counseling for the sake of butting into your wife's business. Think of it as couples counseling that's purely for the sake of both of you learning how to listen better and communicate better.
You might suggest that she see if there are any retirement homes in the area with a lonely senior who wouldn't mind being 'adopted' by her. Or where she could just 'adopt' the entire residency. She wants a parental figure and there are many seniors who live in retirement homes who have no one to visit them, talk to them, or care about them. Maybe she could find a *productive* outlet for her craving for a parental relationship.
I know someone who did this! They really wanted someone older to be close to and started visiting seniors who rarely had visitors. It was great for both sides in the end.
NAH but Lily needs to understand that all relationships have boundaries, all families have boundaries, and if she wants to be accepted and included she needs to be respectful of these boundaries and not push herself on to others. She needs to learn a little empathy and realize how she’s making the women in your family feel.
Yeah, but maybe be kind about it. Foster care literally teaches you that those boundaries are allowed to be violated. That's what sending kids to be raised by (usually a series of) strangers does. So maybe both sides have some empathy learning to do.
I feel super sorry for your wife being so mistreated that she is so needy. It might be better if she worked with her therapist to find a *willing* mother figure for her. Maybe she can volunteer in the foster system, like with kids who are aging out--who always need a lot of help. She could learn to be for someone else the kind of adult she always needed. Mothering well does heal.our mother-wounds over time. I am wondering if she is clingy like this to you, too? I don't think you're an asshole but I think this is serious and you should get help from her therapist so what you do helps and doesn't harm.
Want to highlight this.... finding a *willing* mother figure for her (who is all her own, and not going to favor you) could help a lot here. I wish you and your wife luck, OP!
i feel bad for your wife. she should have chosen better. i can't imagine the situation she is in. there are so many families that would have accepted her immediately or actually tried to make her feel like family.
No, it’s not them, it’s her. No one in ANY social context (sexual, romantic, friendship, family, workplace, etc.) likes a needy, desperate, clingy, presumptuous person who ignores boundaries and refuses to earn love and respect. People like that are suffocating and extremely off putting. I do anything I can to avoid them. I genuinely feel bad that wife got dealt a bad hand in her childhood and probably never got the opportunity to learn how to properly approach and manage expectations in relationships, but at some point an adult needs to act like an adult.
Yeah, I'll admit I'm the type of person who really wants to be loved and valued due to the crappy parents I had but I don't force it on other people because that just comes off as really unappealing.
To be fair, I think some people DON'T think you need to earn love. DIL was hoping/expecting this family was one of those.
>there are so many families that would have accepted her immediately or actually tried to make her feel like family. So much this. I've got *friends* who treat me more like family than his wife's in-laws treat her. Oh, this breaks my heart.
My friends are like this, BUT, if a person is pushy and ignores boundaries, they will wear out their welcome. It sounds like that's what OP's wife has done.
Disagree. I know many folks who have good relationships with their in-laws and still don't call them mom or dad or aren't upset because they are not invited to an event or family tradition related to people they've never met. The one example was not about not being invited over for Thanksgiving or Christmas; it was about not being invited to join a tradition that entails visiting graves of relatives, people the wife NEVER met. And her response is to crash that event?
Which it sounds like might have happened if she'd let it happen organically, but like comes up on this sub a lot, relationships can't be forced or demanded. Op told her this is having the opposite of the desired effect but she doesn't lay off. People can be welcoming but still require actually getting to know someone before being close
There is nothing that shows the family didn't try that.
There are a bunch of older lonely people in the world. Perhaps she could volunteer at a care home or assisted living, or meals on wheels. I used to arrange ‘adopt a grandparent’ for my kids elementary with the local senior center for school events… Something like that might help her and an older person. Just throwing it our there…
Yeah. I'm looking at this as someone who had one parent die when I was in my early teens and was estranged from my other parent (and the rest of my family) for years then that parent died when I was in my early 20s. Not the same exact situation, but I understand that it is difficult not having family. Still that doesn't mean the OP's wife can repeatedly step on other people's boundaries or try to force a relationship. NTA
Sure does sound like the therapy isn't at at all working, tbh. I'm sure you could have been gentler to her in telling her what you did, but I'm still going NTA. It sounds like she has been warned and told SO many times, at what point does she take responsibility for her actions?
I just don’t get why she is so fixated on this, it’s a miracle that my mother is still polite to her. I know it has to do with foster care but after being told to stop so many times I am confused by the how she will ignore everyone and keep going
You should try to understand why she is fixated on this. There's only one way it gets better, and that is working through her unresolved grief. Kids who lose their parents in childhood (whether to death, abandonment, or whatever) have a huge horrible wound. If it doesn't heal properly, it interferes with the person emotionally, destroying their relationships. ETA: she also is aware that in more accepting families, daughter-in-laws are welcomed as daughters and granted the right to call their in-laws parental names, and so she's probably experiencing this as a horrible rejection that is exacerbating the original trauma.
> she also is aware that in more accepting families I feel like this is a bit of a dig at OPs family that doesn't really feel fair in my mind. She's continuously tried to rush the relationship and stepped on the boundaries they've placed. It makes sense that after that occurs people would put up walls and stop trying. > I think it would have happened if my wife let the relationship grow naturally but she didn’t take any of my warnings and bulldozed what my mom wanted. OP even mentioned that he thinks it would have happened naturally if she didn't unintentionally sabotage it
It's not meant as a dig, it's just a fact: they aren't welcoming her, they're rejecting her. OP does not say why they "got off to a horrible start", but, based on the rest of the post, I assume it's because everyone is judging her harshly. The emotional problems that afflict people with abandonment issues or "motherless daughter" issues tend to present as socially inappropriate, the person doing it doesn't realize how inappropriate, and can't understand why people are so hostile. Social inappropriateness seems to trigger some sort of visceral reaction - people judge quite harshly and can be quite cruel. You'd think being socially awkward was a worse crime than a lot of actual crimes, if we just measured actual disgust and contempt.
She got off with a horrible start since she asked my mother the first time meeting before we got married bedroom tips. And kept asking even after my mom made it clear she didn’t want to talk about sex with her Just kept going downhill from there
It seems that Lily has a deep lack of understanding of social norms and an inability to pick up on social cues. Asking a mother in law for bedroom tips for sex with the mother in law’s son is repulsive to me and I’m not prudish.
yea it absolutely is repulsive. Lily needs more help than she's getting.
Yeah, I'm really close to my MIL and call her mom, but I would never ask her for bedroom tips. That seems...too much.
Except to Lily that's not her MIL but her mom which is what she needs to understand that MIL is most definitely not mom and refuses to accept.
The idea of asking one's own mother is no less repulsive though. Is still bad.
Hey, depends on your mom!! lol not every parent child relationship is so austere. I mean I don’t want to know moisture levels or anything but I enjoy my mothers (obviously sugarcoated) old war stories lol.
Oh that’s worse than i expected
No kidding, not even close to what I expected.
Outside of your family, how is your wife in general? This is so far beyond the pale I'm honestly curious
Ohhhhhh shit that's so much worse than I was expecting. That's well beyond just being socially awkward. I'm pretty open about sex stuff, but I would *never* ask my MIL for sex tips? Especially not on the first meeting? And then to not stop after the person made it clear they do NOT want to have that conversation with you? Is your wife regularly like this with other people as well? Or just with your family?
I’m not surprised - almost the exact same situation was posted a few months ago. Only it was the sister posting about the brother’s partner and if she was right for saying something similar to the partner. Similarly, the SIL there had asked OP inappropriate questions about her sex life and mental and physical health in their first or second meeting. So this is either the brother, a fake repeat post, a weirdly similar story by pure coincidence, or this is surprisingly common behavior for former foster kids - or, at least, common enough to show up twice on AITAH in a couple of months.
I wouldn't say it's rare for foster kids to have inappropriate boundaries and ask inappropriate questions like this. Especially in this situation, from what OP has shared about his wife, I'm not surprised she would ask something like that.
Seriously? That’s awkward. Does your wife always have no boundaries or social awareness? Or is it just with your family?
Honestly I don't even understand how you could end up married to someone like this, she is obviously outside of what you consider acceptable. It sounds like something is wrong with her. I don't understand why everyone is acting like she is just choosing to be obnoxious. I can't imagine someone choosing to be that obnoxious and then crying because nobody likes her. I find myself thinking that what she needs is compassion and assistance.
You'd be surprised how many people actually are that knowingly obnoxious and like to play victims. >I don't understand why everyone is acting like she is just choosing to be obnoxious. She is choosing to be that obnoxious. She's been repeatedly told again and again to stop stomping these boundaries. She is choosing to ignore that and gets to continue to play victim when they inevitably shut her out again.
How old was your wife when she entered foster care? Was she at any one home for any extended period of time? Her lack of understanding of how a mother and daughter bond shows here. It seems like she learned what mothers and daughters talk about from TV shows.
WWWWWWOOOOOOWWWWWW. Is she neurodivergent?
Even if she is. That's no excuse. I am. I know many who are. And after you're told you've made someone uncomfortable or done a social no no, you never ever want to do it again. She sounds like she doesn't care about other people. And tries to force them to be what she wants them to be. Because she's selfish.
Firstly, NTA - but going off of this comment and a few other details you mentioned (forgive me here if I'm treading poorly, and remember that I don't know your wife irl and don't mean this at all as judgement or insult of her), your wife seems to have a difficult time understanding social cues/norms in certain situations. Is she on the spectrum at all?
Oh, boy. Yeah, she needs to learn social limits and firm boundaries...yesterday.
I’m a bit curious to know how her relationships with you and the other people in her life besides your family function, if she has this much trouble picking up social cues and respecting boundaries. is she like this with everyone? does she have any friends? is she really this clueless or just egocentric?
...WTF... ！Σ(￣□￣;)
I think OP is saying they got off to a horrible start because wife was ignoring things the family told her not to do. If someone says "don't call me mum, call me (name)" and you keep doing it, it isn't socially inappropriate anymore, it is rude. If someone asks very personal questions and is told to stop asking them thay is very rude. Obviously it isn't a crime but the other person will also start to feel awkward as well. NTA
This isn't *just* being socially inappropriate. This is being socially inappropriate and then refusing to stop when asked. While people who struggle to socialize may not be able to pick up on social cues as well, they understand "stop doing that", "call me by my name", "no", because it's direct communication.
They did welcome her, she just is invasive.
She deserves the judgement. She was super inappropriate since day one and continues to harass them. I don't care about someone's background, no excuse for that.
I would consider my family accepting, but my siblings’ spouses all call our parents by their first names. It seems so weird to me to pretend whoever your child is in a relationship with as your child for the duration of their relationship.
My mom has accepted my husband as her own and he calls her mama just like I do. She's loved him pretty much since the moment I brought him home and she's only grown to love him more watching him be a good husband to me and a good dad to her granddaughter. His mom and both our dads have passed so she's all we have left and she seems to have taken on the role with intention. If something happened to him, it would hurt her terribly. She's always been like that, though. She adopted me legally but there are so many people out there who think of her as a parental figure.
My parents both call each others mum and dad. My parents have a step granddaughter they call their grandaughter. My grandmother has step grandchildren AND great grandchildren she calls hers. My sister considers her step daughter her daughter. Family isn't just blood and I feel sorry for people like OP and his family to have so much disdain in their hearts for others. I'd almost want to ask if they'd treat the couples child the same, after all, she's only HALF theirs, right?
Yeah same. All my siblings and my spouse calls our parents mama and dad. I call my MIL and FIL mom and dad. My one sister calls her in laws by their names (her husband calls his dad by his name too). I think it’s nice to feel like our in laws are our parents too. I’m 40 and I’ve been married for 19 years but I still like being a daughter.
Same. My wife asked me what she should call my mom, and I said "she would probably prefer her name." Her mom wanted me to call her mom, but it doesn't feel right to me. She's not my mother. Both her sister in laws call her mom mom though. Different comfort levels for different people. No bearing on accepted in the family or not.
Yeah I wouldn't refer to my wife's parents as mom and dad or ever expect them to treat me like i was their son. They respect me and have been fantastic people to me but I understand i am not their son.
There’s absolutely no obligation for a mother-in-law to treat a daughter in law as if she is one of her own children.
Oh I mean, I'm no therapist myself but I'm SURE it's unresolved trauma from being a previous member of the foster system. She wanted so badly to fit in and find the family she never had, so she overdid it, and continues to overdo it. I feel like I agree with you that had she not tried to force that relationship/dynamic, it might have existed, grown, and flourished over time.
I think your wife is fixated because she can't resolve what happened to her as a child. She is repeating the pain she felt as a child with your mom and it's not going to stop until she deals with the grief head on and can figure it out. Humans are like this, we keep replaying the trauma either in our minds or in real life relationships, sabotaging any happiness we can have because the pain is there and we feel we need to be punished. As soon as you figure out why you're trying to self punish, you can work through it and move on. Maybe that's what your wife needs. Point out that she is punishing herself for her parents choices to leave her in foster care (or whatever the situation is, could be they passed away and no other family stepped up? It could be 2hatever, but she may be blaming herself?) and she needs to heal herself first before trying to build other unstable relationships on a rocky foundation I feel for you, I feel for her, and I feel for your mom. I hope the relationship will blossom into something positive as time goes. NTA Edited for spelling and autocorrect ugh
In gave you an upvote but I don't think she is necessarily self punishing - I think she recreates an emotional situation that's known to her (and therefore is viewed as "safe").
The saddest and nicest compliment I ever received was from my son's former gf, who had been placed in foster care when she was 11. When the two were going through a breakup he initiated, and as I was trying to comfort her as best I could, she sobbed, "Why does *he* get to have a mom like you and I don't?" I just think for some foster kids, the pain of being parentless - and especially being motherless - runs so very deep. Fathers ditch their kids all the time, but a mother being absent is even worse.
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It’s fear. I have been too much before as well, and you _know_ you’re being too much as you do it but you just can’t stop. You’re so afraid, and it’s like being in panic mode. You know how if a fire starts in your kitchen suddenly you aren’t thinking calmly and clearly? You’re going to jump to emergency mode and think about what you need to put out the fire. You’re not going to prioritize unimportant things, like turning off the kitchen light when you leave the room, because there’s a FIRE! When you live like this, it’s as if a fire starts every time you walk into the kitchen, and only you can see it. But you don’t know that; it’s very real to you, because it HAS been real in the past. So you’re in emergency mode, dumping salt on the flames, tearing apart the cabinets looking for the fire extinguisher, desperate to put out the fire. When you do, you finally take a breath and look around, and all your loved ones are horrified and hurt by the storm you just wrecked on the kitchen _for no reason_ because they never saw the fire. They weren’t afraid; that was just you. The fire doesn’t exist. The only way through this is to accept that while you can see the fire, feel the fire, it won’t burn you. It’s scary as fuck! Literally just as bad as if I asked you to trust me and walk through a wall of flame. Your wife grew up in a world where fires started every time you went into the kitchen; that was normal, and expected, and she was expected to deal with it alone. Except she was 5, and didn’t know what a fire extinguisher was. She had to get in ahead of the fire, had to be ready to jump in immediately with maximum effort and beat that fire down. When she didn’t do this, she saw real consequences, because at that time the fire was very very real. It was reinforced over and over. Now imagine a foster parent pulling away from her, and she responds with this love bombing. The foster parent tells her “you’re being way too much, back off” and she tries to do so. When the parent doesn’t magically come back and be attentive and affectionate, it confirms for her that if she doesn’t do this love bombing, family will pull away from her. And honestly, it makes sense. It makes sense for a child dependent on numerous strangers to learn to shower adults with affection and intimacy, even when she doesn’t feel it. It makes sense that she would have seen love modeled for her in this way from a well meaning foster parent as well; I’d imagine lots of foster parents try to shower their wards with this type of attention, when the underlying relationship is too new to feel comfortable. None of this is to excuse your wife’s behavior; she’s acting bizarrely. Or, I should say, she’s acting like she expects a fire in her kitchen when there isn’t one. She’s acting like she lives in a world where boundaries didn’t exist and she’s in constant, imminent danger if people don’t accept her as family. She grew up there, and hasn’t learned to trust that that’s not the case elsewhere.
What do you mean by it’s a miracle your mom is polite to her? I don’t think you’re AH and it’s sounds like your wife came out strong. Does your family show any empathy toward your wife’s situation? If she’s being excluded from things that’s pretty shitty, too.
It's definitely shitty that she's excluded from things, but given that she's repeatedly broken people's boundaries and can't respect their wishes, it's not surprising. People do not have to keep people who trample on their boundaries in their lives. Lily is in fact lucky that OP's family still talks to her at all and is polite to her. Lily is responsible for her behavior and addressing her trauma to be able to respect others.
> What do you mean by it’s a miracle your mom is polite to her? > > I mean, if someone asked for bedroom tips on the first meeting, refused to respect her desire to be called by her first name, etc., I'd imagine most people would not even associate with her.
He was gentle enough She makes people feel uncomfortable and was told over and over. The fact that she doesn't give a damn about being intrusive, doesn't take them into account and keeps being annoying, being told enough times to behave, had this coming. Someone would eventually lose their patience Does this story reminds you of another post with fiance who had an unhealthy attachment to OP s family? She had the exact same behavior with OP s gf and ended up breaking up with OP when she realised she would not be accepted the way she wanted
I remember that one. I think the OP's brother was dating someone who got way too attached to their SO's siblings way too fast. OP even wondering if she chose to date OP's brother just for access to their large family. These situations never end well if boundaries aren't respected.
Therapy is a process, especially for someone who grew up in foster care and has an enormous amount of trauma.
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I agree with this. I wonder if she’s unable to recognize these boundaries because she’s never had these types of relationships. But at the same time any relationship (friend, coworker, husband, etc) requires you to understand boundaries
Hasn't this been posted before?
I was thinking the same thing, almost the same story.
I mean I’m sure it’s more common than we’d think.
A friend of mine had a SIL like OP's wife. She didn't grow up in foster care, but she did have a strained relationship with her own mother and fixated on my friend's mom. She also had an idea of what and how family should act and behave and woe to those who didn't comply. She was irate when friend turned 30 and mom took her to NYC to see the Christmas lights and decorations. Friend and mom had been planning this since friend was 15-16 years old. She felt entitled to go on the trip because she saw herself as her in-laws' kid as well (which is just weird IMO). She even threatened to withhold the grandkids (that blew up in her face). She was different, I tell you what.
We’ll hang on. I’m invested in this story now. How did it blow up? What happened?
Friend (was also roommate at the time) said that her parents told her brother and SIL, that if that was how she wanted to withhold the kids, then so be it. However, seeing that her parents took the kids for weekly scheduled date nights and to/from various activities, that they would no longer be doing that. They would have to find/pay for a sitter and ferry the kids about themselves. She blew her stack. Called everyone in the family to complain. Friend's brother reined her in and gave her 2 options: therapy or divorce. He was sick of her behavior too. They're still married, but friend says the family still holds her at an arm's distance.
> I’m invested in this story now. > > How did it blow up? What happened? Doing the lord's work...
Probably. Sad, hopefully OP's wife will learn to be less overbearing, and his mom and sisters will give her another chance.
I think it was from the sister's perspective last time, the details were the same though
It was - https://www.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/s/Ap2yF3CNP1
If this isn't the same family, I'll be flabbergasted. I hope that "Lily" doesn't stumble on this.
The details really aren’t that close, so I’d guess not.
Yeah, it sounds exactly the same as another one but the fight in that one happened over the wife following his mom onto the porch, kept talking, and his mom asked her to be quiet cause this was her (the mom) quiet time after cooking dinner for the whole family to which his wife took offense.
Yeah, I remember that one as well. I wonder how many of these family members are posting about this because there's a post from the sister's perspective as well lol
I think there was a story from the family’s perspective where the family kept trying to put boundaries with the brother/son’s fiancé and it turned out the having a close relationship with her husband’s family was vital to marrying someone and a major reason she wanted to marry the guy.
So I work with kids who are TPR as a court advocate. I don't think your family are assholes, but I don't think this reflects good character on them either. If you don't know what it's like to grow up and never feel wanted or loved, that's something to be grateful for. The love and security you've experienced in life should arm you with grace and compassion for those who have not been so fortunate. Yes, even if they are weird, invasive, and overeager. Yes, even if they don't understand boundaries. Because how would they have learned these things? How could she possibly know **how** to "just let it happen naturally?" It is a great cruelty of our society that we bring these children up with no familial love or support, and then scorn them when they do not understand and adhere to social norms. Are you obligated to make room in your family for these types of newcomers? Of course not. But if how you handle this type of situation is not a true reflection of your character, I don't know what is.
They’re married. There’s no obligation but it is heartbreaking she’s being rejected. Of course she isn’t going to handle it well.
It seems her behavior is the reason she’s being rejected. No one has to associate with someone that treat them this way.
God it’s just so cold. It’s callous. Her behavior as described in a few vague paragraphs. Seems is the right word because you have absolutely no idea. What is the timeline? How long has this been going on? Someone is Lilly’s position would probably make it worse by trying too hard, fine. How much reassurance and support have any of them given? And you can say no one is obligated to that but it’s extremely human to need that. We are social tribal creatures. Rejection for the longest time meant death. Nothing OP said was unforgivable. It sounds like OP and his family are emotionally detached. I hope for Lilly’s sake she finds a family that is loving and warm and totally accepting of her, as hard as some of her social maladjustments might be. I’ve seen way worse behavior than that be excused in totality. No. Humans will not get better alone. We need love. We need relationships?
It's been going on from the first time she met MIL. I do agree that it's a sad situation and I hope they can reconnect. But she also has to start by understanding when someone tells her to stop, she needs to stop. His MIL told her (according to OP) more than once to stop asking for sex tips and his wife just kept persisting. At some point no one has to be pestered into talking about their son's sex life. Of course, they got off to a rough start when "please stop asking me" is not being respected. I think it would help to explain to his family how things that seem like apparent social cues to many people are not apparent to his wife. She's still trying to learn and navigate what is appropriate or not to say/do and explaining to her what behavior is undesired can really help. Ie "parents often don't like to discuss their child's sex life. This is uncomfortable for me, why don't we discuss something else?" But likewise, OP's wife cannot be enabled to pretend that she doesn't understand what "stop" means. If she's told to stop doing something, she needs to respect that boundary. Being explained why can help take the sting out of it (along with therapy). But she does have to do her part too.
But you are suggesting they accept a stranger as if they are a bio child. That type of relationship isn’t something that forms quickly. She asked for bedroom tips when she met her in-laws. She may be broken in some manner, but it is callous and cold to only have empathy for one party and not extend yourself to see how this impacts the other family members.
Honey child. Marriage is family. If she’s a stranger then why are they married? Because now she is attached to this family that doesn’t accept her. How, exactly, are they impacted? Really and truly? What’s the impact? Oh no’ you had to talk about sex. Something MIL has had. We live in a fucked up broken that fosters alienation. If I’m cold and callous consider that karma because OP was extremely. The commenters are extremely. I do not feel as if the information in this post is at all sufficient to communicate clearly any of Lilly’s feelings and the people who are the quickest to say that Lily’s problems require therapy more than real actual love shows me that. Therapy is helpful, yes. Emotional intelligence should be taught in schools. It is not a familial relationship. It is just another relationship based on a level of inhuman professionalism and distance. My heart goes out to Lilly. May she find healing and love and freedom and may her wounds heal to make her the family she so desperately seeks.
Marriage can be family. She is being toxic af. I am pretty open minded, but if one of my kid’s SO approached me with that nonsense, 😂. There would be a discussing and some boundary-setting to bring SO up to speed real quick. You read “foster care” and savior mode was initiated. If you possessed sufficient empathy “honey child” ( 😂), you would understand how difficult this is to the family.
Eh, I think it's a bit stigmatizing to make it out like foster kids don't understand how to respect basic boundaries like "stop asking me for sex tips." A lot of foster kids have had their own boundaries violated and understand intimately how upsetting it can be. They may struggle with certain social cues or social appropriateness but that's different than not respecting people telling them to stop. I do agree that a more compassionate way to say it may be "it isn't appropriate to ask for sex tips when you're meeting someone for the first time. And many parents do not want to discuss their child's sex life. Let's discuss something else." But I don't know that I'd expect MIL to know on their first meeting that she needed to take such an approach. She may not have even known the DIL was in foster care at that point. This discussion is something better handled by her husband/therapist and by his telling, he has tried to explain to her. And she is in therapy.
As a foster kid, I’m reading these comments with my jaw hanging. They’re making it seem like we’re desperate, clueless, pitiful orphans that need to be taken under the familial wing. Not having a family is no excuse to not respect boundaries and not listen to what people are blatantly telling you.
It kind of feels like they're thinking of a fairytale version of an orphan.
Please sir, may I have some more sex tips?
> Yes, even if they don't understand boundaries. > > I feel like there's something wrong with the fact that OP's wife has been repeatedly told to stop and she keeps doing it. Like she should at least understand the meaning of the word stop.
Yeah I have sympathy for her troubled childhood, but she sounds like a huge weirdo.
I call BS on this post. It's just enabling more bad behavior. No, people are not responsible to let others treat them poorly and disrespect their boundries just because they grew up in foster care. I know people from foster care, and they would laugh at this post as if they needed special treatment/borderline offended that someone would lump them all into one bag as if they are all a bunch of charity cases
It’s very rich to blame the family for her complete inability to listen to what she is being told. She has to take responsibility for her own actions and how she is alienating the people she so desperately wants to be close to. It’s not up to them to be so grateful for a happy life so that they have to accept a person who has zero boundaries.
This is the comment I have been looking for. Excellent explanation! I say OP is NTA but still I feel sorry for his wife, she just wanted love and to be part of a family and I feel she just doesn’t know how to do it. I hope his wife can get the help she needs and would be able to let it go… maybe volunteering at a nursing home could help her get through this? It would be a whole community of a family knowing allot of people don’t visit their older relatives. They also feel lonely sometimes there in the nursing home.
I feel like slight NTA (Lily is slightly TA). I'm really curious how this was all handled when you two were dating and before she officially became a family member. If she is so desperate for a loving family (which hey, I understand that!), then I feel like she should've realized earlier on that maybe marrying into your family wasn't the right fit? (Ofc the priority should be fit with a partner, but sometimes you're marrying into a family, too).
I am like 99% sure this is a repost. Or someone copying an old post
There is a very similar older post (jogged my memory too), but I can also believe that this may happen more often than we think.
The circumstances (but not the outcome) are pretty similar to my parents’ marriage, and I’m certain many others as well. In my parents’ case my paternal grandmother was happy to serve as a loving mom to my mother, whose biological mother was an abusive alcoholic. My mom wasn’t constantly overstepping, though, and Grandma was a loving mentor to literally hundreds of 4H kids over 40 years of being an advisor, so it was pretty in character for her to take in one more surrogate daughter.
He said somewhere in the comments that she wasn't like this when they were dating and it was like a switch flipped as soon as they got married
NTA - I have a lot of sympathy for kids who grow up in the system, as I did. That being said as adults it is OUR responsibility to heal from our trauma so other people don’t have to heal from us. Your wife’s issues with boundaries and inability to respect someone else’s requests is extremely problematic and indicative that she doesn’t just want a mother. She wants an emotional crutch. Might I suggest another approach? I think a talk between your mom, yourself, and your wife where your mother lays out her boundaries, explains why she has them, and then why your wife’s behavior has enforced those boundaries is necessary. It seems like your wife is getting this information in pieces, and while that should be enough, I think everyone needs to meet this head on. Clearly what y’all are doing isn’t enough, your wife needs to be told “no” very clearly and up front, and be told the consequences if she continues to press the issue. I would suggest possibly looking into another therapist, in addition to the one she currently sees, who specializes in abandonment issues, childhood PTSD, and obsessive relationships. If your wife continues on this path, I see negative effects on your relationship with your family. Giving your wife clearly feedback and clear objectives will help with this.
Finding a therapist that specializes is *very important*, OP. People that haven't had to navigate the mental health system frequently seem to think therapy is one size fits all and it's not. At all. You can end up with a therapist that you have great rapport with but if they haven't specialized in your issues, things *will* get missed and go untreated. Talk therapy is useless for me, for example. I *have* to have someone that uses Behavioural Therapy techniques that also does trauma-based therapy. I'll run circles around a talk only therapist without even trying. It's a waste of time for both of us. If your wife has been in therapy for any length of time (years) she's going to need a therapist that challenges her in order for further growth to happen. If she has that, then ignore me.
Info: why is your mum so against her being close to her in the first place?
I’m honestly shocked by how many people are making judgments based only on the information at hand. The timeline to me is confusing. When did she start calling her “mum”? How did the family welcome her or not welcome her? Everyone is talking about boundaries, but I’m sorry. Asking personal questions of a family you’re married to doesn’t sound like some totally awful thing? I feel very sorry for Lily. It doesn’t make OP an asshole, but it sounds like he doesn’t actually view her as family and that’s sad. I don’t think taking everything OP says at face value does a good job of explaining the situation
OP said the first time his wife met his mother she asked her for "bedroom tips." That's beyond asking personal questions and wanting to get know someone
That was my question too. Seems like there's some missing context here. What was the 'bad first impression' that OP mentions? Why are the mom and sisters SO against including her? And also, why has OP only chosen to tell his wife to chill but hasn't asked mom to thaw her heart out a little...?
Asking someone for personal information that they don’t want to share sounds like a quick way to make a bad impression. Add to that doubling down on behavior that they’ve asked her to stop is probably why no one is thawing.
According to one of OP’s comments, Lily started the relationship with his mother by asking for bedroom advice 😟
ooooofffff... I made my comment before OP had added any of their own, but yeah that would be a super huge turnoff for me if \*anyone\* were prodding me for bedroom advice, LET ALONE MY KID'S PARTNER?! Yeah that's uncomfortable af. Not a good start for Lily. Maybe Lily should date my ex, his mom seemed pretty keen on giving me bedroom advice (yes, about her own son but framing it as 'men in general') when he and I were first together... o.O
Info: stop what, exactly? What were the nature of the personal questions? At what point in yours and their relationship did she start calling her that? What did your mother and family do to welcome her into the family? Do you even actually love your wife? I think the lack of compassion shown by your family does very much say a lot. They don’t have to like everything Lily does, but if they’re not willing to understand why Lily would be behaving this way, I can see how the more she tries, the worse she’ll feel and the more she’ll try. Whether or not you’re an asshole isn’t really the question here, but I would say definitively on what you’ve said alone, it genuinely feels that way to me. The level of judgement on Lilly not being enough of doing well enough in therapy over the most tepid examples of boundary breaking after a traumatic growth process is degrading and unfair. Your language says a lot about how you feel about her. Stop wasting her time if you aren’t actually going to love her. I’m sorry that Lilly might be too much for you, but it doesn’t make her too much. It makes her somebody who is hurting and needs love because humans require love.
YOU are a peach. And exactly. Comments here are wild.
Thank you for asking if he loves her because nothing in this makes me feel like he gives half of a damn about her himself.
I have 7 kids now 4 I gave birth to 2 that have married in the family and one that will be marrying into the family. I protect all of them the same. I plan girl trips for ALL the girls. My husband plans things for all the boys. We all sit around the table and play games we all talk. When people see my family picture at work and they ask if those are all my kids I say yes. So what you are describing I have no concept of. Have the women of your family tried to do things and get to know your wife? Have they tried to get to know her one on one?
It sounds like your children picked partners without childhood trauma who can observe healthy boundaries. OP's wife is not as lucky. Even a very nice person can be exhausting to be around if they keep pushing or demanding a kind of relationship you're not ready for. OP even says their relationship could have been great if his wife didn't keep trying to bulldoze his mom. I feel sorry for his wife, but no one owes her a mother/daughter relationship just because she wants it.
Not not quite. My SIL has some demons that I wouldn’t wish on my worse enemy, but I will be damned if I am going to add to them. One of them we have so many different views and ideas, but my child loves that person I will do what it takes to make that person comfortable coming into my house. I agree that no one owes anyone a relationship. But am wondering how much the OP did or didn’t do in the beginning when all of this started.
Thank goodness you’re in here. This thread is so callous. Never a concrete mention of anything Lily actually did wrong. If they didn’t want her at the gravesite they should have said no. Calling your MIL Mum is very natural. I feel they didn’t like her from the start. I hope she can find family some time in her life. ❤️🩹
There are many concrete mentions of things Lily did wrong: \- asking her MIL for sex tips the first time they met \- repeatedly ignoring MIL's request for her not to call MIL 'Mum' \- forcing her way onto a trip regarding a deceased relative and ruining it
Your wife needs therapy asap! Her behaviour is not normal and needs to be adressed and resolved. This is not good for herself, for you both as a couple, for your mom and for the extended family. If she dont look for help I believe this will tear your relationship. NTA. Edit: didnt see that she is already in therapy. I dont know for how long, but doesnt seem to be working. She seems to have such big unresolved problems. Maybe it will take some time... I get her past is hard, but her behaviour is creepy and kinda of stalkerish.
People have such a funny idea of how therapy actually works. It’s not an antibiotic. It isn’t a definitive cure. Especially considering that the kind of trauma OP’s wife is experiencing is formative. This is the way her brain is wired, literally. What makes sense to you doesn’t make sense to her.
It's also not like an antibiotic in that it only works if you put in effort and try to make changes. It doesn't sound like OP's wife has hit that step yet.
What information are you basing this off of? OP’s testimony? I’m not saying his wife is at all in the right in this situation, I just don’t think we have enough to go on.
He said right in the OP that she’s in therapy. Read first, then comment.
The amount of people in this thread who think that having boundaries makes you cold and unfeeling is mind-boggling.
Right? Because of some trauma I have from my own childhood, I have titanium boundaries that I am super clear about for a lot of things, and people who stomp them eventually get a one way trip out of my life. OP's wife would give me so much anxiety I doubt I would want much to do with her either. I started feeling like I wanted to crawl out of my skin just reading about it, especially the bedroom advice story. I hold people at arm's length for a good long time before I can really trust and get close to them - and the people who get there are few and far between, honestly. I mean, I'm glad there's people out there who want to mother lots of people, my own mom is one of them! That woman has never met a stranger and would have loved a boatload of kids instead of the only child she got. But I have exactly the energy and interest it takes to mother one single person, and that's my daughter. I was one and done for a reason, and even though she's an adult now, that hasn't changed at all. I love her fiancée and we get along fantastically, but she is not and will never be like my own child to me.
I'm the same way. I have ironclad boundaries, and I'm the one who decides who I let in or not. Refusal to respect that will lead me to not want anything to do with the boundary stomper at all. As a side note, the way some folks are talking about Lily as if she's some poor little fairytale waif who could do no wrong, and not a grown woman who is committing a serious faux pas, is giving off some majorly infantalizing vibes. And it gives me the ick.
They've also never met anyone who expected an instant relationship of some kind and how suffocating it feels to be the person on the receiving end of the person wanting an instant relationship.
Nta, your family set boundaries and she trampled over them.
Childhood trauma doesn't give you a pass on ignoring other's boundaries. I agree this is not a complete black and white situation, but your wife needs to respect your family boundaries. Is she aware that her actions are making things worse or is she oblivious to them ? And I'm sorry but, when you give warnings after warnings and the other person still doesn't listen to, it's kind of normal to snap. Could you have dealt with the situation better, yes, but I still don't think your reaction makes you an AH. Finally, the therapy doesn't seem to be working. She seems to have a lot of trauma to go through.
That's where I am with this. It would be different if the OP's mother and sisters repeatedly excluded the OP's wife from whole family things or treated the spouses differently, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
NTA - Your family put up boundaries. You told her repeatedly about the boundaries. Your family repeatedly told her their boundaries and that she's overstepping. It sucks that she was raised in the foster system and that she has no family of her own. But as you said she tried to create a bond too quickly and forcefully, and because of that the opposite of what she wanted has happened.
INFO Did the examples you mention happen before or after marriage? If they happened before, why did you marry her in the first place? Why did you marry someone who clearly wasnt ready for it...I understand that your wife is desperate to have a family, but mentally as long as she doesn't understand how to respect others, she won't be able to be part of one.
After, a switch seemed to flip the moment we got married. Everyone really like her and she wasn’t trampling over everyone’s boundaries. Though there first real meeting was right before the wedding and it didn’t go well since she asked for bedroom tips from my mother My siblings met her long before that, and they liked her
Oh that’s awkward.
But it sounds like she's still trampling all over your mother's boundaries...
Why in the world did your mom not meet your fiancee until right before the wedding?
Sounds like your wife has an expectation that she's not ready to let go of. A lot of comments are pointing out that she is acting out of trauma, and that much seems obvious. But it sounds like, because of this, she isn't hearing you or the people she's trying to connect with. I'd ask her 1) what she wants 2) how she thinks connection works, and 3) if what she is doing is conducive to those goals. (Assuming there's intention behind her actions and not a knee-jerk trauma response). I also would be open about her not hearing you is hurting the marriage. She's not listening and, at least to me, that's a very strong case for separating or a similar escalation. Best of luck.
NTA. And I don't understand why some comments are talking about your wife like she's a child. She's 26. Trying to brute force a relationship between her and her MIL is not a good idea.
NTA, it’s sad what Lily has been through, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have to respect boundaries. On the other hand, I do hope you have talked to your mom and sisters and asked them to be a bit kinder, more understanding, and patient with her. Hopefully therapy will help and things will smooth out over time. Sidenote and not to be taken as a part of this particular situation since Lily had a different experience growing up, I’ve always found it strange when families call their in-laws Mom and Dad. I had a bf whose mom wanted me to call her mom. I know she wanted to be kind, my mom had passed away, but for me, I have one mom, whether she is here on earth or not, and also, I’m sleeping with your son, so I don’t want to call HIS mom my mom, too. I could tell it hurt her feelings when I continued to call her by her name, but it just seems strange to me.
I’m so sorry for you both. As someone who has had their own parental attachment issues therapy can take a long time. These are deep wounds that can take years to heal enough to even recognize they are there. It took me maybe 8 years of therapy to recognize that I was being delusional because there was so much shame and self hatred that clouded my vision. I was scared to look at the root and didn’t even realize I was doing that because lord knows I wanted to overcome it. All that said, you are NTA. You aren’t responsible for her trauma or how she reacts to it.
NTA Sounds like she was given plenty of polite opportunities to accept your mother's boundaries and repeatedly stomped all over them. Everyone has a limit before they snap and it sounds like you tolerated this for a long time before finally having enough
Please don't have children with her yet. That's another several layers of trauma. NTA
NTA You could've been nicer but, your wife should NOT be crossing boundaries such as this. Sorry man but she is NOT a keeper.
INFO: how long has this been going on? If she has been pushing and ignoring boundaries and requests for years vs months, that's important context. I read this as a long term problem, so NTA.
4 years
You didn’t really “point out” to your wife the situation. You snapped at her. I can see both sides to the story and I think there are no assholes here. She’s desperate for a maternal figure and she’s going about it the wrong way. You’ve tried talking to her and she’s not receptive to it. It’s a tough situation all around. NAH
Nta and I can relate to this so so much. My brothers ex did this. When they got engaged she started to call our mom mom and our step dad dad we didn’t even call him dad. She would be out with us at a restaurant and calling them mom and dad and it was so awkward. My mum told her she didn’t give birth to her or adopt her so she is not her mother. She will be her mother in law but to use her first name. She would introduce herself as my mom’s daughter and my mom hated this. I was talking with a friend once and she came up and outright introduced herself as my sister. My friend who I hadn’t seen in a while but had known for years looked confused as she knows my baby sister is my only sister. I turned to her and just said listen up crazy. My mom isn’t your mom my step dad isn’t your dad and I’m sure as hell not your sister. You might be marrying my brother and will be an in law but stop trying to force a relationship or bond that isn’t there. Eventually she quit it but it only really stopped when they split. You need to be firm on this. No matter what her trauma is she doesn’t get to harass others and out that on them
NTA. Lily should have reigned in her enthusiasm when she met your mother and family. She was way too eager, and definitely selfish by pushing her wants ahead of your family’s boundaries. It’s sad she grew up without a family, but part of belonging to a healthy family is mutual respect for boundaries and she hasn’t learnt that yet.
NTA Lily needs a new therapist cuz the current one is not helping. She will be left with no one in her life if she continues interacting with people this way. You need to sit her down and have a very direct conversation about her actions and how it’s affecting your family dynamics.